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This is one event (EmergeOut Conclave) from NASSCOM, that I don’t miss. I attended it last year and made sure I attend it this year too. This year the NASSCOM team have bettered themselves from last year and almost all the sessions were thought provoking & interesting. You can watch the videos of some of the sessions here.
Mr.Bharat Goenka, CMD, Tally Solutions
Mr.Bharat Goenka, CMD, Tally Solutions talked on “How Big is the Domestic Market Really?”. The Talk was simply brilliant. He shared several nuggets of wisdom from his long product making & selling experience to Indian market. His analysis of Indian Market and Piracy was spot on. Some of the quotes from what he talked:
- Pre-sell the future vision, but always deliver the present without fail. It is mistake pre-sell future technology today
- Tally has about 2.0 Million Users (500,000 Companies). 50% of the sale came in last 2.5 years. The first 50% came in 21 years before it. There is another 3.5 Million Unlicensed (Pirated) users of Tally
- Passive data renders itself well to cloud. But Financial data always is active data and you need control over it for legal reasons. If two customers share a same server, if government officer took control and possession of the server, what happens to you or comfortable with it?
- Few decades Music in India was nearly 100% pirated. Today good part of Music Purchase is legal and the revolution was starting rolling by T-Series. Similarly in legal Software the whole buying experience has to be made easy and affordable
- You will find it amazing how Indian Market adapts to new idea
- In India you can have a market of any size you want. You want 1 Million customers you can. All it takes is your imagination, planning & execution for reaching out for that 1 Million customer
- The problem is not converting a prospect to customer, but how to reach them. They are not going to come to you
- Tally was made from Day 1 for a mass market, so that customers most of the time self-service themselves, rather than call our support
- Tally ERP in terms of number of licenses sold is a huge success
Jessie Paul – CEO, Paul Writer
Jessie Paul talked on “Frugal Marketing in an emerging Economy – What works, What’s Hype, What’s Trendy”. The presentation used by her for the talk is here.
- Marketing makes customers to come to you. Sales you go to them. Recently Apple iPad has done it – customer were queuing outside to buy it
- Earlier in my career I was with Ogilvy & Mather. Nowadays customers invite O & M and plead with them to work for them, that’s how big the brand has become
- Marketing makes any call a warm call. Clever marketing makes sure you handle well your aging of products after few years
- Always have a conversation beyond the product or service. Talk and Interact beyond the buy from me, buy from me routine
- Remember, people always buy from people
- There are five tips for marketing
- Think Narrow: This allows you to operate without mass spread. Wherever possible, claim First/Biggest/Largest
- Own the EcoSystem: Create your own story. Try and connect to people who are connected to Decision Maker
- Create your own channels: Institute an Awards (For customers, they too love to get awards). Customize Mass-Media in creative, cost-effective manner, for example you can brand the water bottles given in today’s event or to reach to Indian NRI community advertise in a local magazine like Thendral. Create your own customer community.
- Insights, not information: 5 Years back market research was difficult to make, so people valued it, but not now with Internet & Information abundance. Cardinal sin in today’s business world is to be boring. Have and advertise thought leadership
- Go Online: 20 Million Users in India using Social Media. In India you know who watches News TV Channels more – it is Youth. Success stories like SMS MouthShut. Social Media is social, so CEO has to do it, you can’t ghost write or outsourced it. Finally, Social Media in India may not directly have your customers there, but it certainly has their influencers.
- Clients most time don’t visit your offices, they call your landline to ensure you have a presence
- Create an executive branding for yourself. Have a brand map.
Transforming the CIO into the Chief Innovation Officer
This session was chaired by Sangeeta Patni, CEO of Extensio Software. The speakers included Ajay Dhir (Group CIO, Jindal Steel), Daya Prakash (CIO, LG Electronics India), Padmaja Ravishankar (Head Information Systems, 24 x 7 Customer) and L.Sundarrajan (CIO, Holcim)
- The CIO Association of India is one of the largest social network of CIO’s, IT Leaders and Tech in India
- Jindal Steel selected this e-auction platform over the MNC brands which were expensive and had too many features. The solution is an Open Source Platform (MySQL and PHP). Earlier they were spending Rs.3 Crore per annum, now this whole solution costed Rs.40 Lakhs and the IP was given to Jindal for comfort
- Importance of IT Solution vendor having deep domain knowledge, interest to visit clients factory, their Shop floor, don’t restrict your IT solutions purely from AC rooms
- Creativity is all about seeing what everyone sees and thinking what no else has thought
- Innovation is introducing ideas to the end user and not just producing them. For example: Mobile Printing like a sales person taking order printing then and there an order confirmation
- Person (CIO or his staff) to whom you are selling the IT product or solution, should have the where with all to sell the idea internally with in the organization
- Think over, of all the corners before you present your solution – kind of meditate, focus on it before you present it
- LG Electronics India using an Indian Business Intelligence/Analytics product called Kautilya
User Centric Design: Designing Products for New Markets
This session was chaired by Dr.Girish Prabhu (Director of Srishti Labs, Srishti School of Art, Design & Technology, Bangalore) . The speakers were Warren Greving (Director, Srishti Labs), Kaushal Sarda (Chief of Bangalore Office, 2020 Social), George John Vettah (Founder, Kallos Solutions Pvt. Ltd.), Pallav Nadhani (Founder, Infosoft Global (P) Ltd.), Kishore Ramisetty (Business Head, Innovative Products Group, Intel Technology India Pvt. Ltd.)
- Fusion Charts: Today has 250,000 Users & 15,000 customers in 110 Countries, with over 75 Charts & 550 Maps. Don’t build software, build an experience. Ease of use and Good Looks are paramount. They are going to introduce something called OOMFO charts for PowerPoint. They have closed focus group of customers who give them great feedback
- User centric design is all about making your software friendly, approachable & Easy to use. Focus & Focus on users and what they do, make it easy for them.
- An example of UCD is Intel’s Handheld device.
- HP Labs in India some years back developed an Indian Gesture Keyboard, which focussed on UCD
Innovation Jam: New Ideas for new Markets
This was an unconference interactive and fun session by Kiruba Shankar (CEO, Business Blogging). Kiruba contacted it lively and interesting. The whole session was about making people think out of box, present crazy ideas and then rate them by all present. I gave an idea to make movies “free” to fight piracy. They will be paid by advertisement, so you need to add to a 2:30 Hour movie, say 30 Minutes of advertisement!
(You can spot me too, two people left to the person with the Microphone, sitting)
How SMEs can reinvent IT Services
This valedictory session was Chaired by Mr.Prasanto Roy (President & Chief Editor of Cyber Media). The speaker for this event was none other than Mr.Lakshmi Narayanan (Vice Chairman of Cognizant). I look forward to Lakshmi’s talk, they are always very insightful and he can easily relate to problems facing Indian IT industry whether you are Small, Medium or Large sized.
- Your startup idea should be of a problem big enough to last for 2 or 3 business/market cycles, so that you can correct and perfect yourself
- Integra services – they do backend of book publishing. They acquired a company and got their customers and through that scale
- A young entrepreneur designed an apparel for all weather which can moderate the wearer’s temperature to the surrounding. No one bought the idea, but finally taking it to Indian Army they bought into it
- As a startup you need to invest on say 2 or 3 anchor customers. This is very important till you get all your processes,sales etc in place – till then it is important you be with them
- When a startup doesn’t have a better pricing model it is better to be transparent to client on your costs plus ask a margin
- In the last 18 months clients have consolidated their vendors. Now there is role for big & small companies to collaborate, more than ever. It is a network model where all partners collaborating shares the risk in a ratio to their revenue made. All of them gets paid only when the common goal of the project is achieved. This is different to the conventional model of a large SI (System Integrator) sub-contracting portions of the project to SME vendors
Closing Remarks
In the closing remarks by Sarada Ramani (CEO of CI India) recallled the quote from earlier in the day made by Mr.Som Mittal on how he expects Asia to be No.1 in IT by 2025 and Public Sector to the best market to be in for IT.
Sometimes the best possible way to visualize something really complex is to see it as a graphic and have it printed on a huge poster. Few years back in one of the Microsoft Mix event, they released this super cool visualization of an illustration of the process of launching a web site. It was released into a website as well called “A website named Desire”, which made the huge poster available as a SilverLight Application using Deep Zoom. It is super cool, check it out.
(I saw this few years back and today I was trying to find it. Few hours of Google & Bing search, I couldn’t find it. Then with some help from a friend, I found it back. This shows how much more work has to be done in Web Search)
This is election time in India so politicians are in limelight, let us talk about them too. Before this global economic melt-down it was fashionable for Indian IT Czars to give suggestions and advice to our politicians and ministers on how to run the country. Recently in an IT event in Chennai I heard about what the IT industry can learn from Politicians. After all, Indian Democracy is older than the IT industry and Politics is as old as the time the second human (or women) was born in the world.
- Politicians always play to their galleries. Politicians are the greatest social people, they ensure they constantly appear in the media – good or bad doesn’t matter. Keeping in touch with your audience is very important.
- Politicians ensure they get themselves to the most advantageous position.
- Politicians have no un-necessary historic baggage – No EGO & No Emotional attachments. This helps them to undo and redo ideologies/alliances on an ongoing basis.
- Politicians always maximize their value. Look at what an MLA/MP/Minister earns during his tenure compared to what he/she invested during the campaigns. Politicians are also the biggest risk takers in that sense, because Elections are events where winner takes all.
- Politicians realize and understand their weakness.
I came across this article by Krishna Kumar of DARE India magazine on “19 mistakes online businesses make”. A well written article with good compilations of points that every business going online should note. It talks on most common assumptions that are wrong about doing business online. It demystifies some of the common myths that traffic is infinite, Google Adsense will make you a millionaire, Technology is everything and so on. I especially liked the points where it talked about server sizing and need to plan for adequate man power – which are something we tell our customers all the time.
I read in today’s Economic Times paper’s Corporate Dossier supplement “Smartest subordinates toe the line between being proactive and being over-zealous“. I liked the article, especially the conversation style in which it was written. It subtly puts across on how important being pro-active is for career progress. I have seen many people you wait for their managers to tell them before they do something, while it is important not to overstep on decisions, doing just what you are told will never expose your talents to your manager. Check out the article.
I was invited to do a presentation to students at my alma mater (SVCE, Pennalur). The occasion was a day long event today organized by ECE department’s Alumni Association & IEEE Chapter. I decided against a technical topic for fear of boring the students, instead I made a talk on "Entrepreneurship for Engineers". Following what "George Bernard Shaw" said "I often quote myself. It adds spice to my conversation", I started by quoting myself “There has never been a better time in Indian History for becoming an Entrepreneur”.
I tried my best to make the session very lively and at the end when I counted only few heads where sleeping out of nearly 100 students in the hall. And in the 90 minutes I heard no "Boos" or "Whistles" which itself I think was an achievement in itself. Download – Entrepreneurship for Engineers v2.0.pdf (292.67 KB)
In the evening I presented one more session. This time it was at Vishwak for our weekly Friday sessions organized by our team members as a forum to share knowledge and best practices. Here again I went against a technical topic as I didn’t have the time in advance to prepare on any of the latest or upcoming topics, and if I presented on any of the existing technologies then my team knows more than me  . The topic I talked was on "Presentation Skills" on which I have earlier posted a detailed 7 page post here and as a way of demonstration I did the talk without any presentation aids (No PowerPoint and no Projector).
See the event photos here
Few months back I was interviewed by DataQuest magazine (a popular IT Industry Magazine in India) reporter, on our Mobile and Portal Initiatives at Vishwak. The interview got published in their April Issue. Interactions with Press is an interesting oppurtunity but at the same time a stressful one. It is an oppurtunity for good marketing and publicity, but it is stressful because you can’t afford to have your tongue slip even a bit. Having said that if you play it too cautious and textbook fashion, then the reporter gets bored and you are un interesting as a news item. So you got to walk a fine line, for this I admire the industry stelwards who keep meeting press everyday.
A brief from the Interview: TNC Venkata Rangan, CMD, Vishwak says, “Primarily we are into portal management. We provide solutions to both desktop and mobile environments. Our portal framework is a valuable tool that provides a single point access to information resources and services.”
Read the full article – DataQuest Online, Print Copy (PDF format)
Today’s Economic Times – Corporate Dossier supplement carried an interesting piece. It was about “When hard decisions need to be taken, Corporate India has one solution – fly in an expatriate”.
There are two possible impressions you may feel after reading the article. First one may be that “Why should we need foreigners to tell us what to do, Indian Managers and CEOs are equally capable”, but if you read the article carefully it says “one solution is to have expatriates”, it doesn’t say it is the only way. Second which I thought was that “expatriates don’t have the cultural baggage (not always bad in my opinion) Indian Managers will have to carry with an Indian team, because the team expects CEO to relate and understand them closer. This is not expected from an expatriate, as the news an expatriate is being appointed as a CEO itself signals (certainly wrong impression to carry) tough decisions are in coming. In India there seems to be too much personal emotions attached in everyday workplace – our work life balance is not always maintained distinctly”.
On the same issue, we need to remember that India Inc. cannot be different than what other market and countries are doing worldwide. Remember, we are in a Globalized (flat) world. You don’t need to compromise your core values and ethos, but at the same you will need to be smart and sensitive with prevailing conditions or get killed. And death happens faster in today’s corporate world than ever before.
As far as the above quote concerned is concerned, as a CEO myself I couldn’t have said it any better. You face it everyday with your team members not speaking up opennly, they are unnecessarily courteous and shy for all the wrong reasons.
On a more general note all these issues are not new, but for India – it is, because in living memory India hasn’t seen the consistent growth rate that is seeing for the last few years. We have to pay some price for this economic boom market. The other countries including Asian Tigers have gone through this before, but India is going through it now.
Please leave your thoughts in the comments below – do you agree with the above or not?
Others do read my blogs, I mean it. One of my aquaintance in a software company abroad had read my Interview given to FriendsOfSVCE few years back. In that I have talked about how important it is for people in your team to have right Attitude.
My aquaintance (for privacy sake let us call him Kannan) is facing a situation now and he called me today to help him with suggestions on how to handle it. Kannan is having a Junior Associate report to him and this associate (incidentally from a different culture) is having serious attitude issues, according to my Kannan. Kannan’s question to me is how important Attitude in the overall job responsibility or in other words how bad should a bad attitude be to declare a person unfit for a job and what qualifies for a bad attitude.
Very difficult questions to answer. Attitude is not a data point and it cannot be measured and expressed in numbers – you cannot say this job role expects an attitude of 75% and the person in question is scoring only 62%. It is subjective, relative and also vary between cultures – especially in this case it is a multi-culture team, where each member is from a different culture/ethnic backgrounds.
American Hertiage Dictionary defines “Attitude” quite nicely:
- A state of mind or a feeling; disposition: had a positive attitude about work
- An arrogant or hostile state of mind or disposition
Software and Design Jobs are all made in the “Mind” of the individual. So it is important that the person doing the job is in a right state of Mind for him to perform well and to the extend demanded by the job responsibility. That is why companies pour tons of money into having a good HR, work environment, etc. A negative attitude certainly affects performance, but the tricky thing is how can you measure them and convince your superiors/peers/legal that it is bad and qualifies for a change/fix.
When you face a situtation like this:
- Have no doubt, it is your job responsibility as a manager to handle these issues. It is not something you are alone in doing it out of your loyalty
- You will never get people who match your requirements/measure 100%. Accept people for their strengths, but don’t compromise on the job qualification bar
- You need to have made it clear (communicate) to the Associate that you are not happy with their behaviour/attitude. One of the points I hear in Exit interviews is that people say they didn’t know you are unhappy with them and they cannot read your mind on your expectations
- Give the other person few chances to correct the issue in question
- Then talk to your manager - they will have more experience than you in handling situations like this (or) talk to your Office HR Manager. Ensure your manager is in your side for your planned course of action - whatever it is
- Document things. Especially since in USA, things can get messy with Legal actions. What you said over a coffee table don’t count on your side, but can count for the other party
- Start laying down the work items that you are expecting the associate to do, the time line to complete it and send it as an email or Intranet work item. Be realistic, don’t be pre-judiced to make him fail in the timelines set. Doing the list, the associate will know that you are serious on what you are saying and that if he is smart that you are trying to prepare proofs for your case. This itself might fix the problem, if not you can use it for your case. Have your manager/his manager endorse this list. Ask for regular reports on the progress. The minute you are clear that his job is suffering because of the attitude your assessment is validated.
- Lastly, once you have done all this, take a decision and be firm with that. Read my first point again.
Finally I told Kannan “As an Engineer you don’t feel afraid writing the most critical piece of code, so why have doubts while you are facing management issues. Face it with the same courage. Plan well and Things will work out well”.
Today I was invited to present on “A Case Study – on my experiences as being an Entrepreneur”. The event was Computer Society of India’s National Symposium on PREPARING IT PROFESSIONALS FOR 2010- A ROAD MAP. The event was featured in “The Hindu” Education Plus supplement dated 26, March 2007 (Hi-Res).
I enjoyed presenting in this, especially to see the enthuism and the energy with students.
You can read the references notes I used for the talk here – PPTX Format, PDF Format. It is not very detailed as I didn’t project it as a slideshow.
In this connection, I remembered an Interview of me done around 2003 by Pallavi Aravind Narasimhan from Friendsofsvce (One of Alumni Associations of my college). Most of it is relevant, but remember it was four years back!
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